


can't start a fire without a spark

by devourthemoon



Category: The Good Wife (TV)
Genre: F/M, Jealousy, M/M, Multi, Power Dynamics, Threesome - F/M/M, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-12-06 23:05:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18226607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devourthemoon/pseuds/devourthemoon
Summary: In any marriage, there are things you do just to have a secret to keep, and there are things you do to hurt yourself, and the problem is that she can’t quite tell which this is.“I’m not asking whether you’re fucking,” Alicia says, the weight settling into her own jaw now. “I asked whether you fuck him.”





	can't start a fire without a spark

**Author's Note:**

> I guess this takes place during some amorphous time during the first third of season 4.

****At some point, it. There’s no other way to put it. It becomes a thing.

A thing they should talk about.

Frankly, the only reason it goes on for so long is because it’s Eli. _It’s Eli,_ Alicia thinks, on her third glass of wine on a weeknight, not rationalizing but rather… mulling it over. Letting it permeate. It’s Eli. Being jealous of Eli Gold is like being jealous of the mall Santa Claus for making the kids laugh when they were little: completely irrational and a waste of everyone’s time. Because what else is he supposed to do, if not completely bowl Peter over? Why would Peter have hired him, fallen for him — fallen for him in the colloquial, if not the more immediate and urgent and physical — if not that he is all that he says he is?

You don’t hire Eli Gold if you don’t want to win. And winning, as it is, often means a strong hand. A strong will. Being whipped into shape. Alicia’s grip tightens on the stem of her pinot noir glass (from which she’s drinking chardonnay, all she has at home tonight, and she can’t help feel like a bit of a bad girl for it), and she thinks, darkly, not for the first time, that there are sides to Peter that she hasn’t, can’t, wants to know.

 

*

 

“I just want you to know,” Alicia says, and Eli’s eyes widen, nearly imperceptibly. His jaw sets, his eyebrows twitch, and shoulders hitch forward, tautening all at once, and these are things she notices because she has taught herself to notice them, these signs of guilt, acquiescence, admission. She notices them, and immediately she is emboldened, because there is no way that he isn’t—

“—there’s nothing to know,” Eli says.

Alicia blinks, slowly. “I just want you to know,” she says upon opening her eyes, “that I know what it looks like.”

“What it looks like when.”

“When my husband falls apart.”

She lets that hang in the air for some time, waiting for another tell, a masterstroke, but instead there’s nothing, which, well. Good boy, she thinks. He’s learned to keep it all upstairs when the cards are on the table, but hasn’t quite learned to control himself before it’s all out there. Which, well. She can work with that.

“It’s not like that,” he says.

“Bullshit.”  
  
“It’s not like that. It’s never been like that. Peter and I are.”

“Go on.”

“It’s not something that.” Eli doesn’t trail off. He stops short, as though stopping himself from stumbling off a ledge, a cliff, down into a ravine he can’t climb out of. He stops, he recalculates, and he says, “It’s a special relationship.”

Something snarls inside Alicia at that, something dark and cruel, a feeling she doesn’t like but has become well acquainted with over the past couple years. Yet there’s a hunger to it, too. An anger, but a ravenous one, an ache demanding to be fed, like waking up in the dark hours of the night with potassium cramps in her calves, a starving dark void somewhere deep inside her and all she can think is, _hurt him_.

“I’m sure,” is what she says.

 

*

 

In any marriage, there are things you do just to have a secret to keep, and there are things you do to hurt yourself, and the problem is that she can’t quite tell which this is. Peter’s in his office, engrossed in a pile of documents. She could just walk in, grab him, feel him out, but she’s afraid that she won’t like what she feels:  
  
“Eli, I need to—” Peter says when she rests her hand on his shoulders from behind, and that’s when she knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what it is.  
  
“It’s Alicia,” she says vacantly, and Peter starts in his own skin. 

“Of course,” he says when he looks up, squeezing her hand. “Let’s go to dinner.”

 

*

 

She’s so tired, so worn down, sick with dark jealousy that she does something stupid. Stupider than her usual kind of stupid. That when Peter rests his head on her thigh, looking day-worn and cunt-drunk and older now than ever, she lets the words slip out before she can think twice.  
  
It’s not dark enough in his bedroom and she’s not drunk enough to ask like this, but she asks anyway. Rips off the bandage and winces at the burn. She expects Peter to recoil, to feign ignorance and innocence, and for him to make this harder than it needs to be. Because that’s what he does. He lies, and she digs, and when she finally has him pinned down at rock bottom, he finally gives up the ghost and tells her what she already knows. She’s starting to suspect he likes the chase, that he wants to be caught. But this greasy, oily feeling has got her feeling nauseated from morning until the moment she falls asleep, and she can’t build up a case, brick by brick, the way she usually does.

“Do you fuck him?”  
  
Peter’s heavy-lidded eyes don’t widen; he doesn’t flinch. He pushes his face against her thigh where it’s red-burned by his 11 o’clock shadow, and he says, leaden, “I thought we weren’t going to talk about what happens during the separation.”

“I’m not asking whether you’re fucking,” Alicia says, the weight settling into her own jaw now. “I asked whether you fuck him.”  
  
This, perhaps, shakes him; Peter’s gaze flickers up to meet her eyes, and he looks guilty, a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar, but then he murmurs, “No. Actually, he fucks me.” And then, after a moment, “Are you happy now?”  
  
  
*

 

It’s all she can think about; her body thrums with it. In court, in review, in traffic, at dinner, the leonine purr of _actually-he-fucks-me_ won’t let up and she feels, maybe, like she’s going crazy with it. She can’t look at Eli straight in the eye, and she knows he must know, because this hotel story feels like nothing but an elaborate setup for him to ask the questions Peter told him would drive her over the edge:  
  
“Do and Peter have an open marriage?” He asks it with such a straight face that she nearly buys it; she answers, but it sets her spinning —  
  
“I could kiss you,” he says, and she nearly chokes on her tongue before brushing it off —  
  
“You can’t be too careful in hotel rooms,” he tells her when he sees she’s racked up minibar charges for a bottle of water and a bag of Baked Lay’s on an out-of-town trip, and she closes her eyes —  
  
It’s not a question; it’s barely a suggestion. It takes every bit of self-control she can muster not to answer what he isn’t asking. He’s not on their team, she reminds herself. Eli Gold is out for Eli Gold. That’s all it’s ever been.  
  
  
*  
  
  
Which is why, when Eli slips her the key card — unmarked and without comment — she feels as though she might kill him there, singlehandedly and without regret. The accompanying text with the room number is worse: just the number, _6:30_ , a minute later. He thinks he’s being subtle. It’s a fucking Peoria Marriott, she wants to scream. The cover-up is worse than the crime. Isn’t that how they always fucking get you, the cover-up?  
  
She seethes inside all the way to the Marriott. She ruminates on it, swallowing and yurking it back up again and swallowing again until all that’s left in her mouth is the taste of bile and blood from biting her cheek. She seethes, and still, there’s something there, a nasty sense of curiosity. The venom is there, but where are the fangs?  
  
At the hotel bar, she orders two shots of tequila.  
  
“Are you expecting another?” asks the bartender, too young and cow-eyed to know her name or her face, and she shakes her head.  
  
“Just me,” she says, feigning cheer, “it’s been a long day,” and the bartender pours both shots, and she knocks them both back, not bothering with the salt or the lime.  
  
Her phone, on the bar, vibrates with an incoming call, and Will’s face flashes onscreen. She grits her teeth, and hovers over the green flashing circle, letting her indecision carry the moment of inaction until the screen goes black. If he needs her, he’ll call back.  
  
Upstairs, the lock clicks and whines as she fumbles with the key card once, twice, wondering whether Eli even gave her the right one, whether this was a setup, whether—it clicks again, flashing green, and she closes her eyes. Presses down on the handle.  
  
“Alicia,” says Eli as the door thuds shut behind her, and she opens them again. Not knowing what she expects.  
  
It’s exactly the same as any other night on the campaign trail: Peter sprawled on the bed, his eye loosened and his shoes and jacket kicked off near the door but completely clothed otherwise. Eli, sitting in the barrel chair at the desk, his sleeves up to his elbows, nursing a drink. A bottle of whiskey sits uncapped on the dresser. Not the kind from the mini; mind the campaign’s incidental charges. You can’t be too careful in hotel rooms, he taunted, breath hot on her neck, and Alicia suddenly feels unsteady in her heels.  
  
She chooses to kick them off instead, shedding her blazer and stalking to the bathroom to take a cheap plastic cup from the counter, which she fills halfway with a heavy pour of Jameson from the bottle on the dresser. “Eli,” she finally asks, “what are you doing here?”  
  
He inclines his head, arching his sharp eyebrows. “I could ask the same of you.”  
  
Alicia is — rarely dumbstruck. She prides herself on this, on her ability to remain steady on course, her mind like a guided missile, no matter what the opposition fires into her path. Yet the absurdity of the situation in which she finds herself is somehow enough to set her spinning out, less a missile and more a car on black ice, spinning and sliding and grappling for the emergency brake. She looks at Peter, who has a thick sheaf of papers in one hand and his own whiskey in the other, and she swallows the laugh rising in her throat, and says to him, “So this is what you wanted.”  
  
A smile, a nod, a shrug, any admission of guilt — she’d take anything at this point, and instead Peter merely cocks a brow of his own and says, “You wanted to know what it was.”  
  
“I didn’t think,” she says, and Eli chuckles, sending another lightning-strike of jealousy searing through her, “that it would be… I wouldn’t have invited you, when Will and I were…”  
  
“I never asked you to,” Peter fires back, and takes a sip of his drink, looking smug and proud.  
  
“I still wouldn’t,” she says, her face hot. “Because that isn’t — I don’t share, Peter.”  
  
“I don’t have to remind you that we’ve been separated for months.”  
  
“ _Mending fences_.” It comes out brittle and shrill, not half as mocking as she intends it, and she adds, “did you think this would help? Do you think he’s on our team?”

Quietly, Eli clears his throat, and she can’t help looking at him, studying him, every inch: the razor-sharp angles of his slight frame, concave where Peter is convex, hard where age has begun to soften her husband. _Actually, he fucks me_ , Peter says again and again and again in her mind, and every image she’s spent the past feverish two weeks doing her best to suppress comes flooding back at once. Jealousy snarls, spits, rattles, but not like she knows it. Seeing, and thinking, and imagining — Peter with other women — that was another thing. It sickened her, made her feel small, starved her of oxygen until the flame flickered out. This sensation is something else entirely, and it’s new and strange. She wants more of it.  
  
“Prove it,” she murmurs. Her voice comes out strangled, and she clears her own throat to force the words free. Peter and Eli are both looking at her with wild-eyed wonder.  
  
“Pardon?” asks Eli, and Alicia shakes her head.  
  
“You wanted me here for a reason,” she says. “If this isn’t all some game to you, seeing how far I’m willing to go, then prove it.” She swallows. “I want to see.”  
  
There’s a terrible moment on the edge, and she wonders whether she’s misjudged it all. Whether they really have been playing with her, taunting her, gaslighting her into thinking there’s something there that never could be, _remember when I used to sleep on your couch?_ Eli said and it was playful but knowing and cruel all at once and perhaps that was by design. But a half second later, Eli rises from the chair, sets down his drink and crosses the hotel room in three paces, closing the distance between himself and Alicia. And then his hand is on her waist, spanning the small of her back, and he’s so close she can taste the liquor on his breath certain he can taste hers as well.  
  
Forehead to forehead, he holds her gaze so long she thinks this must be a test, and finally whispers, “You _are_ serious.”  
  
Alicia laughs. She can’t help laughing, it’s fucking farcical, and then Eli breaks away, back to Peter, who still stares at them with a dull slack mouth, handful of papers long forgotten, and Eli says, “You heard your wife, Peter.”  
  
“Okay,” says Peter, his voice thick, and Alicia swallows and wobbles to the seat Eli abandoned as her legs threaten to give way. She sits as Peter tosses his papers aside and sets down his own drink and sits up, legs spread wide on the neatly-made bed. Put on the spot like this, he looks uncertain, but, she thinks, Peter is a natural performer. Born for the spotlight.  
  
Leaning against the wall, Eli unbuckles his belt, the clink-clink torturously slow and loud in the quiet of the room accompanied by nothing but Peter’s heavy breathing. He crooks a finger, and Peter rises, goes to him with that dumb dark laser focus on his broad, open face. Alicia curls her fingers around the plastic cup of whiskey, curls her toes against the scratchy hotel carpet, digging in desperately for traction, as her husband ( _husband, husband_ ) pushes Eli’s back straight and flush to the wall, boxing him in with his solid weight. Their noses, brushing, forehead to forehead, and she wants to close her eyes, but she can’t look away, and then Peter closes the space between them and presses his mouth against Eli’s.  
  
She wants to shout. She nearly shouts. It’s like she’s being Clockwork- _fucking_ -Oranged, the way she can’t look away, and still: Eli deepens the kiss, Peter opening his mouth easily; Eli bites at Peter’s bottom lip and produces a dark groan that Alicia knows better than she knows her own mind. Okay, she wants to say, okay, the joke’s gone on long enough, let’s move on, but her heart is pounding and her cunt is _thisclose_ to developing its own pulse as well, and she knows fully well there’s no going back now. They’re well over the precipice. There’s nothing to do but wait for the impact when they hit the ground.  
  
Their hands are everywhere, making quick work of buttons and zippers, and suddenly Peter is sliding to his knees in desperate supplication. Alicia’s face burns, her head spins, and she struggles to remember how normal people might act in a situation like this. She takes another sip of whiskey, letting it burn its way down her throat, as Peter moans again, rubbing his face against Eli’s crotch, his eyes shut as he mouths at the outline of Eli’s erection. She rarely sees Peter so open, desperately wanting, not anymore, and this is —  
  
This is how she likes him. Open. Shell-less and vulnerable, and eager to please. Often, she wonders, what more she could do to bring him down to his knees like this, to the place that seems like his sweet spot, and all Eli has to do is crook his finger.  
  
“Go on,” she says, and Eli’s dark eyes slide over to hers, tightening his grip in Peter’s dark hair as a predatory smile spreads over his sharp face. He pulls Peter’s face away, thrusting his chin up, as he frees his erection from his pants, and Alicia swallows again as her eyes flick down to Peter’s.  
  
He holds her gaze this time with that same look of desperation, and she nods, and takes another sip of whiskey. Not for courage, this time, but for — something else.  
  
“Go on, then,” Eli says to Peter, but Peter doesn’t need the direction. Alicia can’t tear her eyes away from his mouth, his plush lips, the darkening flush over his face as he takes Eli’s cock into his mouth. He looks, she thinks with giddy heat, like a natural. _My husband sucks cock like a natural_. The nastiness of the thought sends another white-sweet-hot thrill up her spine. Peter isn't teasing this out, she can tell; he’s taking Eli all the way down, barely stopping to breathe, and then Eli tightens his grip in Peter’s hair once again and starts to fuck his face in earnest, and she doesn’t — she wants more, more, this can’t be it —  
  
“Stop,” she hears herself say, and when Peter pulls off, a strand of saliva glistens between his dark-red lips and Eli’s flushed cock. It looks obscene, filthy, downright pornographic, and she looks to Eli, her inhibitions suddenly blown and gone. “Peter says you fuck him,” she says. “Is that true?”  
  
Eli swallows, his chest heaving. “I’m,” he says. “Do you. I would—”  
  
“Peter says you fuck him,” she repeats. “Yes or no. Is that true?”  
  
“Yes,” he says too quickly, and Peter, on his knees, shifts his weight, runs a hand through his messy hair.  
  
The room spins around Alicia as she nods with the gravity of it, swirling what’s left of the drink in her cup. It’s so easy to say this last part. It shouldn’t be hard to make the words come out. Peter, on his knees, guilty and fuck-drunk with his gaze whipping between Eli’s cock and Alicia at the desk, and Alicia crosses, uncrosses, crosses her legs again, and finally says, “Prove it.”  
  
“Dear God,” Eli says, but her attention is fixed on Peter, who looks dumbstruck on the floor. She doesn’t have to ask him if he wants this. She’s known from the moment she walked in that he does.  
  
It happens in a blur: Peter rising, letting Eli manhandle him back toward the bed, shucking his pants and boxers in an instant. Eli, fumbling in his carry-on for a bottle of lube, inclining his head toward Peter, a wordless conversation Alicia can read without much thought, a whisper about condoms and _—_ and Alicia, feeling _freakishly_ giddy now, wondering how frequently Eli does this, how frequently Peter does this, whether they’re each other’s _only_. “Please tell me you two use condoms,” she says, her voice thick and choked.  
  
“Peter’s such a whore,” Eli says, casual as anything, “I wouldn’t opt for anything less,” and Peter whines, throwing his head back against the pillows as the room spins out again.  
  
It’s just that. She’s only vaguely familiar with this part. She knows there must be something, but _gay pornography_ , it’s never been something she’s thought to look up, god only knows what lurks on that side of the internet — but pornography couldn’t be half as good as this, the way Eli shucks his undershirt and pulls Peter up by his own loose tie to press a punishing kiss to his mouth, forcing another rough moan out of him. It seems like an awful lot of fumbling hands, really: Peter’s tie and button-down tossed unceremoniously aside, Eli grasping for the pump bottle on the bedside as Peter yanks his boxers off. She could move, perhaps, from her vantage point at the desk, but the distance and the angle obscure just enough that it almost feels _hotter_ , somehow.  
  
“Oh, God,” Peter gasps, and Alicia falls back into the chair, spreading her legs, finally allowing herself to ruck up her skirt. She’s soaked through her underwear, completely ruined them. Just from Peter’s little show. She’s nearly angry at herself for it, but then Peter gasps again as Eli does _something_ — “Your fucking hands,” Peter groans, “I want to—”  
  
“Tell Alicia about the time you came just from my fingers.” Eli bites off the words, sounding nearly angry, and Peter moans wordlessly, arching his back up and splaying wider over the bed, and Alicia presses the heel of her hand down hard on her clit and nearly shouts too. “Tell her about the time I brought you back to my place — laid you out on the bed — got four fingers inside you and made you beg.”  
  
“Fuck, Eli.” Peter’s eyes are slitted shut; Eli’s moving his hand faster now, drawing those little whines out of him harder and faster now. “Please,” Peter said, shamefaced, “I won't last.”  
  
“You never do,” says Eli, and smacks him hard on the hip with his free hand. “Please what?”  
  
“Fuck me.”  
  
Alicia groans out loud, but they barely seem to notice. Eli draws back, and a rip of a wrapper later he’s yanking Peter’s hips toward him, bearing down over him, and Alicia finally pushes her underwear to the side, pushes two fingers inside her throbbing cunt when Peter lets out a roughshod groan as Eli enters him. Peter’s panting, whining, some messy string of _please God please Eli please fuck me_. It’s filthy. It’s filthy and stunning. Eli, lupine and feral on top of her husband, is fucking into him hard and slow, bottoming out with a thudding roll of his hips each time, pressing Peter’s wrists to the sheets, and it’s.  
  
“Harder,” she says out loud, and they both look at her with a start. “Harder,” she repeats. “Fuck him harder, Eli.”

Eli, if nothing else, takes direction like a champ.  
  
She’s fucking herself in tandem with their thrusting now, eyes locked on their hips across the room as she braces her legs on the desk for traction. “Yeah,” Eli says into Peter’s ear, but it’s loud enough that they both can hear, “it’s almost like I’m fucking both of you, huh.” They both groan, Alicia clenching around her two fingers, pressing down hard on her clit with her free hand, and Peter shouts, too, writhing against the bed as Eli holds him down. It’s that shout, the wave of their bodies moving together, that sends Alicia over the edge —  
  
“Fuck,” she whispers, “Peter, Eli,"  
  
— clenching against it, riding it out. Eli’s leaning into Peter’s ear again, gritting out the words, “You can do it, Peter, I know you’re close, come on my cock,” and suddenly Peter shouts out too, wild-eyed and flushing. Eli’s hips stutter, snapping once, twice more, and Peter cries out again, and then — it’s all very sudden — they’re still.  
  
Alicia’s hip pops as she lowers her feet to the ground. Peter looks fucked-out, wrung dry, and Eli is still wild-eyed over him as he looks back to Alicia in wonder. “How the fuck,” he says with bemusement, “did you two time that?”  
  
Alicia shakes her head. She doesn’t know. “It isn’t usually that easy,” she says, and Eli shakes his head like a wet dog. His hair, normally gel-perfect, looks as wild as his eyes.  
  
“Alicia,” Peter croaks. She jolts, ready for the comedown. But Peter just beckons her to the bed. Bed. Feet. She’s unsteady as she goes, but she goes anyway, and Eli rolls away with a grunt. She can hear him puttering in the bathroom, sink going on and off again, as she settles onto the mattress, nestling against Peter’s side. Peter smells like sex and sweat and Eli’s expensive cologne, she realizes as she presses her face to her chest and inhales, and yet — the jealousy doesn’t hit her, only the same molten heat from before.  
  
“You smell like condoms,” she snickers into his chest hair, and Peter's chest heaves as he laughs too, stroking her hair with one heavy hand.  
  
“Alicia,” Peter says again, but she shakes her head. They will discuss this later. There’s not any room for doubt. But right now, there’s no way. Recency bias, she thinks dimly, is a thing. Maybe in time she’ll forget, but. Not right now.  
  
Eli comes back in, hovers by the desk and looks them over, and Alicia raises her eyebrows. He looks almost nervous. Like maybe he’s misjudged the whole thing. She’s never seen him look this off-beat before. If this was all it took… well, now she knows.  
  
Peter pats the bedclothes beside him, and. Well.  
  
“I never said anything about cuddling,” Alicia says.  
  
“I don’t perform for free,” Eli shoots back, and she doesn’t have time to argue before Eli’s joining them on the bed, folding himself into the free space there.  
  
It feels, though, like an inevitability. Like something that was always going to happen. A marriage is two, but now they’re one and one and one, and there are — endless configurations, really. She can overthink it later, but. Putting them into competition with each other first, that’s one, and putting Peter on his knees again, and maybe making Peter watch them, for a change. She can overthink it later. 


End file.
